Please do not read Patrick deWitt’s marvellous novel The Sisters Brothers with the skeptical eye of a historian. I cringe to imagine the exceptions a reviewer could take with its lack of sufficient historical accoutrements or its bevy of blatant anachronisms. This sort of reading would be a grave, grave mistake — perhaps the literary equivalent of complaining that a Slayer concert was too loud. Because rather than concerning himself with showboating his period-specific research, deWitt has deliberately flouted the rules of straight-laced historical realism here, to stunning effect. And most importantly, what he does get right are the flawed and jagged hearts of his characters, which is all the real this reviewer needs.

What Western is real anyway? Aren’t they all revisions and stylizations of the past? From the kindergarten morals and the ridiculous bloodlessness of Hollywood Westerns, to Louis L’Amour’s pat Harlequin Romances for men, to the populist machismo of spaghetti Westerns and their impossibly slow gun duels, the genre has never registered very high on the reality scale. Consider the more recent imaginings, whether it’s Blood Meridian’s biblically merciless slaughter, or the jarringly cuss-laden Deadwood, or Clint Eastwood’s fantastic Unforgiven (about the sting of regret lingering in an aging killer), or Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, a frontier feminist page-turner — A Gun Belt of One’s Own? — that romps through the Canadian wilds; in each case the artist has minted their own unique Old West.

This novel follows two brothers, Eli and Charlie Sisters, infamous assassins sent on an errand to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, an ingenious (and, as it turns out, extremely likable) man, who is accused of stealing from their boss, a fearsome figure named the Commodore. Luckily for us, the genre permits deWitt to turn his considerable powers loose, allowing him to rummage the treasure chest of English with much less constraint than a story staged in the contemporary world. All the obligatory Wild West language is here, which is always enjoyable, especially when used sparingly, as deWitt does: “directly,” “fortuitous,” “mighty” (as in “mighty kind of you ma’am”), “yellow” (for cowardice), “tincture,” “ungodly” and so on. But he also channels this verbal liberation to land some devastating jabs of brutal poetry that we’ve yet to hear. Like: “Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated,” or “All you will get from me is Death,” to choose just two. There is a delightful irony generated between this over-formal, old-timey way in which the characters speak, and the horrific subject matter they are often aiming to relate.

The brothers soon set off from Oregon City, on their way experiencing a cavalcade of sights and adventures in the narrative form of the picaresque. The chapters are very short, at times disjointed, a technique that mirrored nicely the sputtering consciousness of the alcoholic narrator of deWitt’s first novel, Ablutions, but at times here can read slightly sketched-in, dangerously close to a film treatment. (In fact, this novel’s film rights have already been sold to John C. Reilly’s production company, knowledge I would rather not have had while reading the book, as I struggled to banish Reilly’s face from my visualizations of Eli, our portly narrator).

Despite the surface differences, The Sisters Brothers is quite similar territory to Ablutions, which, set in a dive bar, offered a world of petty criminals, prostitutes, con artists and slovenly drunks — serving as a kind of aching celebration of miscreantism, a basking in the low-grade glow that comes off certain lost souls in the right light. Here in the Old West, deWitt finds a gigantic barroom to populate, a feat he accomplishes masterfully. Deranged prospectors, prostitutes, industrious shopkeepers and criminal overlords stalk the planked sidewalks. Silent people, disfigured people. People with unspeakable pasts and damned futures — full of equal measures depravity and virtue — who long ago came apart and simply kept going. He also manages nicely to fry some bigger thematic fish in the process. Of San Francisco, Charlie notes, “It’s a good place to kill someone, I have heard. When they are not busily burning the entire town down, they are distracted by its endless rebuilding,” offering perhaps the best description of America I’ve read in years.

While hunting Hermann Kermit Warm, brothers Charlie and Eli are at turns gentle and hilarious, at others unthinkably cruel, the worst of which usually comes as an afterthought that the narrative whisks over with an unsettling disinterest. They pass much of their time bantering, mostly concerning who’s in charge, the scheduling of their journey, who has a better horse, or what to do with the money they steal. They also engage in some lovely Jackass-type buffoonery, injecting dental anesthetic for fun into Charlie’s cheek, experimenting with this curious phenomenon by having Eli strike him soundly and repeatedly. Great comedy indeed, especially so when one reminds oneself what these men actually do for a living. However, there are moments when the bickering strays toward farce, when the laughs come too easy and screen-ready — jokes about Eli’s weight for example — and things begin to feel uncomfortably like a buddy movie, or Dumb and Dumber redone with cowboy hats and occasional outpourings of extreme violence. But this is rare, and overall, a minor concern.

At the book’s centre is Eli, the narrator and softer of the two, certainly the most endearing character. We learn early that Eli’s heart has never really hardened to killing, and the soul of the book lies in his emotional thaw. deWitt’s Dostoyevsky-like renderings of a mind that knowingly does wrong are where his writing really soars. “My very center was beginning to expand as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless.” Eli is an increasingly sensitive man in an insensitive world, and even begins to pity his disabled horse, Tub, an unheard of thought-crime in the Old West. This is a contemporary mind dropped into a historical situation, but who cares about accuracy, because Eli’s mounting compassion for the one-eyed animal is perhaps the most touching aspect of the novel.

And it doesn’t stop there. Eli begins to idealize a slower, safer life. He develops puppy-dog crushes. He worries about his clothes, and even worries about his weight after being deemed too heavy-set for the tastes of a woman he fancies. A hilarious internal struggle over a piece of cherry pie ensues. Just imagine John Wayne from The Searchers declining a rasher of campfire-crisped bacon and opting for boiled carrots if you still need confirmation that we are indeed in uncharted territory.

Most of all, it is in the small details of their day-to-day lives where the conventions of the Western are deliciously trampled. Sure, there are saloons, prostitutes, brawls and sneak attacks on the bad guy’s camp, but the Sisters brothers mostly battle the mundane. Hangovers, petty squabbles and misunderstandings. Choosing toothpaste flavours. Cooking food. Eating. Sleeping. Or even the-never-before-seen-in-a-Western casual masturbation to raise one’s spirits. The overall effect is fresh, hilariously anti-heroic, often genuinely chilling, and relentlessly compelling. Yes, this is a mighty fine read, and deWitt a mighty fine writer.